CTAT: Efficiently building real-world intelligent tutoring systems through programming by demonstration

Speaker
Vincent Aleven
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are highly effective in supporting student learning, but are difficult to build (Murray, 2003). The Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) project started over 6 years ago with the goals of of making tutor development easier and cheaper. CTAT supports tutor building through programming by demonstration. Tutors built with CTAT have been used in real educational settings for a wide range of application areas. In this talk we illustrate that example-tracing tutors are capable of sophisticated tutoring behaviors, going well beyond VanLehn’s (2006) minimum criterion for ITS status. We present development time estimates that indicate that CTAT improves the cost-effectiveness of ITS development by a factor of 4 to 8, compared to historical estimates. Finally, we discuss whether CTAT’s programming by demonstration approach will scale to support large-scale tutor development, a question that has come to the foreground as we are building Mathtutor (http://webmathtutor.org), a website with intelligent tutoring systems for middle-school math.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Vincent Aleven is an Assistant Professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. His research focuses on understanding and improving learning with ITS, with an emphasis on authoring tools, tutoring metacognition, and supporting learners in ill-defined domains. Dr. Aleven is a member of the Executive Committee of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center. He has served on the program committee of major conferences in intelligent tutoring systems, and has organized numerous workshops during these conferences. He will be the Program Committee Co-Chair of the 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, to be held in Pittsburgh.